Comments on: Can the customer experience be managed?

By: Becky Carroll

Becky Carroll — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 17:51:49 +0000

Roger, words of wisdom, indeed. Thanks for your contribution to broadening our thinking!

By: Becky Carroll

Becky Carroll — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 17:51:17 +0000

David, thanks for adding in your comments. The idea of facilitation is a good one in this situation. I like the post you referenced, and if a faciliator of the conversation can learn like the one architect did, then apply it back to improving the customer experience for others, we would come much closer to meeting our customers’ needs.

Great to have you here, David!

By: Becky Carroll

Becky Carroll — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 17:49:26 +0000

Ron, thank you for your thoughts – always good ones! I agree that the internal processes and strategy need to come together with the external conversations/feedback/research with customers. Too often, I don’t see the external feed back into the internal; they seem to operate on their own. If each time we touch the customer we take what we learn and apply it back to improving the internal processes in order to meet customer needs, we do indeed get a little bit closer to “managing” the customer experience. The journey is long, but the path is clear.

Thanks again, Ron!

By: Roger von Oech

Roger von Oech — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 17:23:20 +0000

Thanks for the mention. I also like the old folk saying,

“The dog that trots about finds the bone.”

By: David Armano

David Armano — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 22:26:36 +0000

Nice challenge of the “management” concept. I like the idea of facilitation. It implies guidance yet the flexibility to allow for when things go differently as planned. But good facilitators know how to guide a discussion so that it ends up being productive.

By: rshevlin

rshevlin — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 17:45:21 +0000

Great question, and excellent thoughts. Personally, I’ve been frustrated with a lot of the talk around customer experience management because so many writers co-opt the term to fit their own view of the world. I’m also surprised that practically no one sees CEM as the flip side of the process reengineering fad of the early 90s. Back then, firms were running around “reengineering business processes” to reduce cycle time, eliminate errors, improve efficiencies, and reduce costs.

What many of them didn’t do was ask “what do our customers want?” Thankfully, firms are asking that today. But few are putting two and two together. That is, recognizing that customer “experiences” often (but granted, not always) occur within the context of what the 90s manager called a “business process”. Instead, we talk too broadly, and talk about the “online experience” or the “branch experience”, etc.

So can we “manage” customer experiences? I think so. We just need to integrate the external (customer perception, needs, wants) with the internal (process design) components.